


Desolate Beacons

by CyanideLatte (Yoru_The_Rogue)



Category: Carrie - Stephen King, Christine - Stephen King, Doctor Sleep - Stephen King, Firestarter - Stephen King, The Shining - Stephen King
Genre: Carrie is a poltergeist in this, Dark Past, Gen, King'verse, Mini-Fic, Not Beta Read, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Self-Indulgent, Some themes of life after death and mortality, and you can take that as platonic or romantic as you so please, headcanon heavy, i'm writing this for me but y'all can read if you want, idk if this fits any typical fanfic genres but it's meant to be at least somewhat emotional, if you've read any of the books you know, kind of, shipping isn't going to be a part of this, those who Shine, though i may hint at a Carrie and Arnie dynamic later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:41:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29923224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yoru_The_Rogue/pseuds/CyanideLatte
Summary: Just as like calls to like, Shine is drawn to Shine.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Desolate Beacons

It was called The Overlook, and it waited and _seethed_ at the Roof O’ The World, atop the scorched earth that was its ruin.

And it was evil.

Carrie almost balked in the face of it, and her mind struggled to consolidate the teachings of her mother and the wisdom of her own experiences to what she had encountered, in coming to this place. But the roiling, watchful, _hungry_ shadowmass was evil. Pure, concentrated evil. _That_ , she knew for a fact.

And it was studying her.

The Overlook didn’t have any eyes and yet it had too many eyes. No faces and yet, too many faces.

_(false faces)_

Where had that thought come from?

Somewhere within the teeming mass of gray, whispering evil, something—no, _someone_ —had called out to her. She knew she had been called, as surely as the surviving residents of Chamberlain had known she was the one to raze and purge their town. The problem now was she couldn’t find the singular bright thing that had broadcast its cry to Carrie; it was all but lost in the shifting, hateful shadows that comprised The Overlook. She watched, horrified and disgusted, as it moved.

Most of the time it tried to hold a single, unified shape, the vague approximation of a massive building. Carrie wondered briefly if it was some sort of palace, until the term “grand hotel” came to her, unbidden. But even as she watched it try to hold its shape, the restless shadows were pulling themselves apart to try and separate into more solid, more _human_ shapes. The shapes of bodies and hands would try to mold themselves into her vision, fighting to pull their arms and legs free of the rest. All too quickly they would lose that struggle and get absorbed back into the collective mass, being swallowed until only their grotesque faces were left to hiss and whisper before they too, were consumed.

It frightened her more than she wanted to admit.

Something of her fear must have broadcasted, because The Overlook pulled back slightly , and when it next spoke to her it was in saccharine tones of placation.

_(Welcome, young, sweet lady. We’ve been looking for someone just as special as you.)_

“Special?” she echoed, feeling dubious. She _was_ special, like it or not, that couldn’t be denied. But the way this thing said it made her flesh crawl.

_(do I have flesh am I even really alive?)_

She frowned at the thing, trying to draw her power inward as her stomach _(what stomach?)_ flipped end-over-end with an unpleasant sharpness. Something in her instincts told her that while The Overlook already had a sense of what she could do, it was dangerous to let the thing know _all_ she was capable of. She could only hope she held back enough and quickly, to not prompt suspicion.

_(You’re alive enough to us, Carrie.)_

She swallowed, shifted her stance. She didn’t like the sound of that, not at all.

“Wh-who are you?” she asked, getting used to the sound of her physical voice again, or trying to. She preferred to try talking this way; it seemed important, almost vital.

The shadows pulled back as though considering her question seriously, and then they started to mold shapes. Carrie had recently seen more and more mountains in her wanderings than ever before when she’d been alive, and she watched this strange phenomenon and thought it looked like people were growing out the side of a mountain. Three or four approximately human shapes formed from what looked like a cliff wall or a gigantic brick of soft clay. Yes, clay, that’s what it was like. A giant’s dark brick of sculptor’s clay, cutting out people-shapes from its sides. As they formed, they took on more distinct features: Carrie was sure there were three men and one woman, and they all must be very specific people. They all smiled at her in one eerie, synchronised move, smiles that did nothing to soften what she saw in their eyes, and Carrie knew right then she didn’t like any of them.

False faces.

_(We’re friends, Carrie. The best kind of friends you’ll ever have, the only kind you need. The kind that sees how special you are. The party never has to stop here. It’s always grand, and you’re the guest of honor. The REAL guest of honor.)_

She shuddered, the motion left over from life, reflexive. The first, last and only ‘party’ of any kind she’d ever been to had become a nightmare from right out of Hell, sent by the Devil himself. Or so she’d believed. Now, here, talking with this malevolent force, her fateful prom night was becoming much paler in comparison. Trying to read The Overlook’s intentions was difficult—no, be honest with yourself, it’s impossible to do without risking the exposure of your own mind—but she had the sense the ‘neverending party’ The Overlook spoke of would do worse to her than she had wrought upon Chamberlain.

“I don’t like being made fun of,” she said, trying her best to replace the tremor in her voice with the iron will that ran through her core. “I don’t like when anybody laughs.”

_(No, not laugh. Why would we ever laugh at you? We like you, Carrie. One could say we would even come to love you!)_

The response came a little too quickly to be real. It never actually said that, did it? No, that was just what Carrie _wanted_ to hear. Or...what The Overlook believed she wanted to hear. She balled her fists at her sides and steadied herself as she looked at each of those false faces in turn, trying to glean the truth from them.

_(could you even glean truth from something untrue)_

One of them, the woman, grinned at her. Something about her mouth and her purplish-yellow complexion made Carrie so uneasy she had to look away, towards the other figures. One of the men was smiling too, smiling so broadly at her like he was a person in a toothpaste advertisement. He wore a very fancy, expensive-looking suit that was crisp and sharp at the edges, and he had a strange dusting of glitter and confetti on his shoulders. She looked away again, unconsciously registering the way those two spectres flickered and dimmed, and examined the remaining two. Both stood upright and at attention, dressed in the spiffy, starched uniforms of bartenders. One, an average-framed, neutral-faced gentleman, mechanically polished a glass he held as he watched her. The other, who was stockier in build and had an unsettling light in his eye, adjusted his stance, making as if to hide the bloodstained axe in one of his hands. The image of the axe shimmered, as though it was a figment of her imagination

_(but it’s not my imagination, it’s there)_

as he assessed her.

_(Lloyd and Grady. Their names are Lloyd and Grady.)_

Carrie gave a small start. The names had popped into her head without preamble, much like the thought of the “false faces”, and she realized now that the voice of those thoughts was distinct from the voice of The Overlook.

Who else was here?

_(Yes, Lloyd and Delbert Grady and Harry Derwent and Lorraine Massey. And many more besides. You’ll never be lonely again.)_

Yes, the voice of The Overlook wasn’t a singular, distinct thing when it spoke to her mind. It was one deep, buzzing hisscrack of a thing comprised of many voices that had long gone silent over decades, come together to try endearing itself to her. None of the spectres had spoken individually, not yet. She hadn’t seen a single mouth move when she received these thoughts. She turned to look at the first two spectres again...only to find they’d nearly vanished, they were going so transparent.

“Troubling business, isn’t it?” a pleasant voice remarked. She turned back again and noted with some surprise it was Lloyd who was speaking. “They wanted to greet you with the rest of us,” he continued. “It’s tradition, of course. Madame Massey is a long-term resident and delights in greeting newcomers, and Harry has always had a vested interest in anyone we invite to join us.” After a beat, Lloyd’s mouth pressed into a thin, bloodless line and his dark eyes flashed angrily. “Unfortunately…”

“The Torrance boy,” Grady interrupted. Despite his lilting British accent—yet _another_ point of surprise for Carrie, his voice didn’t match his appearance at _all_ —she could hear his undercurrent of anger very clearly. It rippled all through the shadowmass, a spike of hatred so concentrated she found herself putting her hands to her temples in an effort to fight off a sudden, throbbing headache. “He’s very special, yes, not unlike you. However, he has always been very willful. Very flagrantly rebellious, that one.”

He continued to speak, berating this boy for his behavior and the instability of Mrs. Massey and Harry Derwent, but Carrie had begun tuning him out. Something else was here as well, something… Well, she wasn’t quite sure. The presence of The Overlook was strong enough she felt any ordinary person might sense its wrongness. When Grady spoke, when he’d said “the Torrance boy”, there had been a faint reaction from something that felt masked. It was only the faintest ping on a radar, a passing glance or a brush against one’s shoulder before the thing went out-of-sight-out-of-mind again. However, this wasn’t the first time in her wanderings she’d had such an encounter, and she refused to let that blip pass out of sight and out of mind.

She knew something else was here, something being smothered in the shadowmass, too faint to almost detect. Something The Overlook didn’t want anyone to know about.

Frowning, Carrie reached out with her mind, trying to project a sense of searching, a lifeguard vessel looking for someone in the water in the dead of night.

“What are you doing?” Grady’s voice demanded in a sharp tone, but he sounded distant, muffled. She couldn’t be bothered with him. Instead she poured more of her focus into the sensation she was broadcasting. No, she couldn’t stop at a mere searchlight on a boat. She had to be a lighthouse, a radiance that hidden, smothered presence couldn’t miss.

This wouldn’t be like last time.

The last time some months ago, Carrie hadn’t done anything. She’d wandered across a car idling in a parking lot, a long-bodied, red-and-white car with large tailfins and flared headlights. Even from a distance, she’d sensed its awareness, its malevolence. As she passed it, a mutual recognition flew between Carrie and the car, a wary understanding that a confrontation would result in no good for either of them. She was content to leave it at that...and then she’d noticed something within that devil-car.

The car itself had some life of its own, if you could call it that, and an assortment of ghostly attachments, rotting, malevolent things that hung about it and gave off a horrid stench that Carrie could feel. Yet among them she sensed a few spirits that weren’t entirely gone over to ruination, echoes of people who still had good in them. But as though sensing potential interference, the car’s engine growled suddenly, impossibly, in a very open warning. The ghosts had vanished and the car sat empty and watchful. Carrie took the hint. She left without looking back.

She refused to do so a second time.

“Wouldn’t do that if we were you, sweetheart.”

Grady and Lloyd were advancing, and they no longer wore their pristine, lively masks. Beneath the surface, they too were ugly and ruined. She saw the murderous intent in their gazes and knew. Had she been alive, Grady would have rushed at her with the axe. She forced herself to ignore them as best as she could, flexing that muscle within her mind and trying to push her sense of light towards that spark she’d felt, wherever it was.

“Oh dear.” Lloyd’s voice held a note of disappointed condescension. “And here we thought you were such a _good_ young lady.”

Carrie did her best to ignore him, keeping an eye on Grady’s advance even as she continued to push her efforts into her search. For a second she was unsure. Had she felt the other presence? Was she just imagining it? A beat, two beats—there! Something flickered in response, a strange, somber little light trying to reach back to her. She felt a pulse of anger rippled through Grady, then Lloyd, and then she _saw_ it force the boiling shadows to go still. Only for an instant, but it was all she needed to realize that the presence she felt was deep within The Overlook, and that it was strong enough to _fight_ it.

Carrie grinned, and watched as the revenants stepped back in uncertainty.

“Lloyd is right,” Grady remarked in a voice like ice. “It appears you’ll require some _correcting_.”

A tiny, bright kernel of anger flared in her.

“You know,” she said, “Momma used to think that about me too.”

Grady had begun advancing against and adjusting his hold on the haft of the axe, but her words gave him pause. His eyes were glittering with malice, but the faint slackening to the lines of his mouth hinted at fear. That was good. He ought to fear and respect her.

_(the entire Overlook ought to)_

She tried renewing the force behind the one thread of thought, her searching one, but she barely did so before it snapped taut. The presence she was seeking had grabbed the other end, and she could sense it sending a faint signal back to her.

Her triumph was short-lived.

The Overlook—the false faces it was showing her, the boiling shadows, the crawling sense of evil, all of it—realized what was happening and redoubled its efforts to silence that single thread of thought, assaulting Carrie’s mental barrier with a shrieking cacophony of rage. She rocked back on her heels from the impact, nearly losing her balance. Any fear she felt burned away with her breath, immediately replaced with defiance and a determination not to be stopped.

_(oh no you don’t)_

The next several things happened in the blink of an eye.

Grady charged, lunging for Carrie, the reach of the axe impossibly long.

Carrie sent an urgent plea reverberating down the thread, urging whoever was on the other end to help her, to fight back, The Overlook couldn’t stop them from connecting and working as one.

_(everyone in Chamberlain may also think I needed correcting)_

That thought lanced like lightning and struck into the shadowmass, giving rise to shrieks of anger and fear.

Lloyd stumbled, staggering like a drunk.

Carrie stretched out her arm, splaying her open hand, and Grady’s charge ended as she struck against the invisible force that she pushed outward. Rather than physically rebounding off it, Grady burst into a human-shaped pillar of ash that maintained its shape for just a second before crumbling into a thick powder that retreated like a snake racing for its den. Carrie watched warily and maintained the barrier.

She thanked her lucky stars she didn’t let it up, as another revenant—she wasn’t even sure who this one _was_ —slammed against the wall of energy at the same instant Grady’s ashes retreated.

_(Make them take their medicine)_

She barely registered this thought as belonging to whoever she’d reached, but when it popped into her head, she grinned absently. A terrible, wild expression of unfettered ferocity.

She liked that thought. It was **_good_ **.

“Well,” she said, “I think you all need—”

_(Make them take)_

“—a taste of your own medicine.”

And this time she pushed with everything she had—love, anger, betrayal and sorrow for what she’d endured in her life—and threw it all against The Overlook in a single, tremendous strike. There was a heartbeat of resistance as the thing tried to shut her out, but a surge of strength from within, from the connecting mental thread, flooded Carrie and joined with her raw power.

The Overlook let out an enraged shriek and its shadows tore apart

_(Jesus came back from the dead, the veil in the temple tore from the top to the bottom because God tore it with His own hands, and o Momma why are you so angry about it, wasn’t it good that God wanted to save all people)_

and in the space cleared knelt a revenant unlike the others.

Carrie approached slowly, the shadows and screeching faces retreating as she passed, and studied the man she’d reached.

He was older, maybe middle-aged but not quite, with reddish-blond hair that hung down to his chin in waves and blue-gray eyes that still held a spark of undeniable goodness in them. He shook as though afraid or under strain, but whether he was one or the other, Carrie could sense he was strong, deep down. Perhaps not strong enough to withstand The Overlook by himself, but smart enough to see he and Carrie could do so together.

But how, then?

And that was when she noticed something very peculiar about him.

Light behaved odd, around this man. Somehow it emanated from him, faint white beams, but it was also being drawn _into_ him, as a light that... _wasn’t_ ? Dark light, like it had somehow gone wrong. Even as she watched the push-pull of illumination surrounding the man, she _felt_ The Overlook gradually begin moving back to him.

“It’s the shining,” the man spoke, startling her.

At first she had no idea what he could be talking about. What was shining? And why would he say that to her? What did he mean, and why was he saying it like he was answering a question?

“My boy,” the man said, and his voice was heavy, coarse with emotion. “My Danny. He has it… He shines. That’s what that cook calls it.” He looked at Carrie, his gaze scrutinizing but not unkind. There was no laughter in his eyes, no cruelty. “You’ve got it, too. Different. Real goddam different, but it’s there. You shine. That’s how I heard you.” He glanced away then, eyeing the twisted, hissing evil around them with distrust. “That’s why they want you. Your powers, your thing, your...shine. They want to consume it, like they wanted to with my boy.”

Carrie thought about the thread connecting them. About the countless times she could make things happen, make things move, just because she wanted it. About every hurtful, vicious remark she’d ever heard from other girls even when they never spoke the words aloud. About how, that prom night, she could _hear_ the minds of everyone in Chamberlain as they witnessed her path through the town. And about the way she’d pushed what was inside her out, against The Overlook and its false faces.

_That_ was all ‘shining’? Was that what it was? What she could _do_ , what she _was_ and why it made her so different from everyone else?

She shone?

“Like sunshine,” the man confirmed, offering a wan smile.

The compliment warmed her, truly warmed her to the core in a way she’d not felt but once in her entire life. She knew right then and there, no matter how awful this place was at the Roof O’ The World, this man was good.

_(Jack Torrance, but no I’m no good at all)_

His thought came easily to her and she approached him, absently pushing her barrier out around her.

“What do you mean? Of course you’re good.”

“No,” Jack said, shaking his head in shame, “I’m not all that good. I’m not proud of the things I’ve done. Feels like all the bad outweighs the good every time I think back. I think that’s why I’m here. Atonement, or something like it. I wouldn’t face up to my failure, and that’s how it got me.”

Carrie drank in his words, listened, but didn’t quite agree. There was absolutely good in him, even if he didn’t see it. She knew there was. She’d felt it, clear and strong when he boosted her power.

The shimmer of the refracting lights caught her attention. Held it. Pieces clicked into place. She knelt close to Jack, reached out, and gently clasped one of his hands in both of hers.

“You shine too,” she said kindly, hoping he wouldn’t argue with her or deny it. It was strange to comfort an adult, but she had the sense nobody had offered Jack true comfort or compassion in a long time.

Perhaps that was something they had in common.

Jack looked at her, puzzled, his brows knitting together in a frown. She felt his uncertainty through her thread, but it was mixed with something like curiosity and a touch of relief. She smiled in what she hoped was an encouraging way, and tried to push at him a thought, a glimpse of the strange lights she could see surrounding him. After a second or two, Jack’s tired smile resurfaced.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

Loud hissing, the sound of fire angrily consuming an offering, split the air. Carrie flinched, the entire motion carrying through her spine. This time it was Jack who emanated a burst of power outward as the whipping darkness lunged for them. Raw power—shine, Carrie told herself—tinged with a righteous anger enveloped them and flung bright thorns out at The Overlook.

_(like a cactus)_

The thought was a silly one and she had to stifle a giggle in spite of herself. Jack kept his gaze on the shadowmass, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward and the teenager felt a surge of kindness and affection reach her.

She’d never known her father. She had only had stories, vague ones, about the man. And even then Momma hadn’t been one to speak of him often. Over time she’d been able to convince herself she would probably be better off that way. She tried telling herself she couldn’t miss what she’d never had—

_(boy oh boy is THAT ever a lie I know better)_

—but even then she knew if her father had been alive, he would not be the kind of father she would long for. A father’s love was never meant for her. Her mother would have agreed to that in a heartbeat.

Yet in that instant, Carrie had the sense that Jack had given her a touch of the love and affection at the core of his soul, the love that still endured for the sake of Danny.

Tears stung her eyes and her vision went blurry.

Grateful, she tried to push some of her power out and give it to Jack. This time she saw it, a clear suffusion of light that pooled in her hands and altered the brightness of her sight for a split second. She’d never held her—gift? curse? was it both?—like this before, and her tears poured out from the sheer, overwhelming beauty of its shine.

The light around Jack pulled in that small offering, faster than she could have imagined.

_(Thank you)_

The words were there and gone, and then the light poured out in powerful, unshadowed brilliance from Jack, chasing away the reaching, clawing dark. Carrie, bolstered, renewed the outward push of her telekinesis, forcing The Overlook back even further.

“You’re a powerhouse there, missy,” Jack said in awe, but that was dashed quickly, replaced with a firmness and urgency that she realized stemmed from that core of paternal love. “But that’s why you can’t stick around here. That’s why The Overlook wants to get you.” He reached out suddenly to grab her by the shoulders and she jolted at the contact. “ _Don’t let it_ . Whatever you do, get out of here! You’ve already stayed too long as it is. You leave, _now_ , before it’s too late!”

She was about to protest that she hadn’t even been there long, but already the edges of the condensed evil rooted and rotting at the Roof O’ The World crept back in, clawing hungrily for them both. Jack’s blue-gray eyes swept around them rapidly and he released Carrie with a small shove. Realizing what he meant, she got to her feet and backed away, watching in sinking despair as The Overlook swept in around Jack.

“What about you?!” she cried, throat growing tight and closing up on her.

Jack shook his head with a sad smile.

_(Sorry, but I don’t think there’s any saving me)_

Her tears renewed as she watched his light—

_(his shine)_

—flicker feebly, and she choked on sobs as the shadowmass enveloped him like a spider wrapping its prey in silk. She felt her heart breaking. It was irrational, she was sure that she was reacting irrationally...but the tears continued to pour and her chest hitched with sobs for this man she barely knew. There was something warm and good in him, and no matter what he thought, she _knew_ he didn’t deserve to be trapped in this place. Nobody did, except maybe—

_(no, don’t think like that)_

Jack’s sharp voice cut off her train of thought and she realized black tendrils had begun to converge around her ankles. They gripped at her with thin, fragile fingers that broke apart quickly and left frustrated shrieks hanging in the air. Angrily she shook them off and backed up another step. Realizing Jack had saved her a second time, she looked up at him in desperation.

The shadow-silk was twining about his chest, and rippling walls of darkness surged around him. He was being reabsorbed.

“Carrie?” he said gently, and before she could register he’d plucked her name from her mind through their brief connection, he asked, “Just do me one favor?”

Sniffling, she reached up, brushed aside her tears with a nod and said, “Yes.”

“If you ever see Doc—my Danny—please be kind to him.”

There was hope and light in those sad, sad eyes and behind that, Carrie thought she could also see understanding. And perhaps she could. Jack appeared to pull in things with his shine, whether he meant to or not, and he’d certainly learned her name that way. Was it wrong to think he had seen her loneliness and her pain and _knew_ it? Understood it? Recognized that she’d never known real kindness in her life, save in tiny, sparse crumbs thrown her way by people thinking they should be lauded for showing pity to the town’s reject freak?

Whatever the matter may be, she made up her mind.

“I will,” she answered with a sniffle, holding her head a little higher. “I promise.”

The Overlook had nearly swallowed him whole now but Jack’s face lingered, bursting into a tired smile more genuine than anything worn by the false faces around them.

“Thank you,” he said again.

Then he was gone and she was left staring down the reformed wall of gray waves and silently screaming masks of fury.

It was time to go.

_(You’re not going anywhere!)_

The shriek of outrage slammed into her head and echoed in her mind, a great bell tolling with the voice of a doomsayer. She forced it back, pushing the voices of The Overlook out out out, even as it pushed back. For a terrifying second, neither side gave way.

_(Don’t give up! We can help you!)_

Two new voices joined the clamor in her mind, and then the tiniest boost brushed against Carrie’s power.

With another screech of thwarted rage, The Overlook was thrown back. Carrie barely had the time to process her victory before small, cool hands gripped hers and pulled her away.

“Come on, miss, come on!” a little girl’s voice, faintly accented, spoke from somewhere near her waist. She glanced down and saw nothing. No no, there was something. The faint outline of a child. In a spring dress?

She didn’t have time to be puzzled. She let herself be led away, even as she heard a second girl with a more authoritative tone add “You _don’t_ want to let Mr. Torrance down, do you? Let’s go, before it’s too late!”

She ran.

_(ghosts ghosts ghosts)_

If she had to be honest with herself, these little girls didn’t frighten her at all. Perhaps they would have before...before…

“Before you became like this?” one of them prompted in her sweet voice. The two continued to grip her hands as they led her down the winding drive, towards the mountain road. Carried noted with some surprise that though she ran, the girls appeared to glide through the air. Glancing between the two, she saw they shared many of the same features in their benevolent, wide-eyed faces. Sisters, she thought.

“You don’t need to be frightened, not of us,” the other girl said stoutly. “We’re trapped here as well, but all the bad stuff where the hotel used to be, it doesn’t want us.”

“It _hates_ us,” her sister added pointedly as they reached the mouth of the road.

“That’s why we help Mr. Torrance as much as we can,” the elder one declared. “We watched you, you know. You’re very brave. And you made him remember he’s strong too.” They stopped at the mouth of the road and the girl looked up at Carrie in quiet examination, green eyes wise beyond her young years. “Same as you. But that’s why you need to leave. The Overlook wants you _because_ you’re strong.”

“It wants to break away,” the younger said, and for a moment Carrie thought she could hear some fear in her voice. “It can’t leave here and it wants to. That’s why it wants people who can do what you do, what Danny can do. Even people who only have a little twinkle. It wants the power to leave.”

Carrie felt her heart sink. “And that’s why it took Jack,” she murmured. “That’s why he said to leave.”

The ghost girls nodded, the motion flowing and floating in the air like water.

“We can’t go past here,” the elder said. “Not without trouble. We get all thin if we do, then we get pulled back.”

“Please be safe out there,” the younger added, grasping both of Carrie’s hands in her tinier ones and looking up at her with pleading sincerity. “It’s scary out there too.”

She looked between both of them and mustered up a smile, squeezing the ghost’s hands in return.

“I’ll try. Thank you. And please tell Jack I said thank-you, too.”

The girls smiled at her, fading into nothingness as the wind suddenly picked up. She snatched one last little thread without meaning to

_(o God oo their names they’re Grady’s little girls Marta and Clara they died here because they tried to burn it down they DIED here because their daddy oo their daddy KILLED them because The Overlook had him o those poor girls)_

and slowly turned to look back at the scorched earth where a once-grand hotel sat, its pool of negative energy gathered in a macabre, teeming facsimile of itself in its ruins. She shuddered, hugging her arms. She shuddered for Jack Torrance and for those little girls, trapped here in a place she felt mustn’t be unlike Hell. She shuddered for the horrors she could sense had happened there over many, many years, innocent blood spilling to leave the place unhallowed.

_(blood blood so much of it it’s raining down it wants to drown me)_

She shuddered for herself.

Precious little remained lately, that she found she was truly frightened of. People, even if they didn’t always see her, even if they underestimated her, couldn’t stand up to her power if she needed to use it. No mortal dangers of the world really bothered her now and nothing barred her passage. But the thing that sat at the Roof O’ The World

_(so much blood unhallowed ground)_

terrified her.

So the young, lost and lonely poltergeist named Carrie White left Sidewinder, putting as much distance between herself and The Overlook as she could. She never truly forgot the encounter she had there, that day. Indeed, each time she thought about being told that she shone and what a marvelous feeling it gave her to think of herself that way, she remembered the sorrowful eyes and ruddy-blond hair of Jack Torrance and found herself wondering what it would be like to have a parent who loved her so fiercely. But for a while the rest faded, and it would be some time before she remembered her promise about a boy named Danny.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this first chapter in chunks at a time during breaks at work or when I had time on my days off, so I'm not sure if it's even fully cohesive or well-structured, but also it's not really meant to be fully dynamic. Mostly I'm just writing this because I want to see the characters I love interact because it's something I desperately need.  
> A few bullet-point notes:  
> \- I gave the Grady sisters some headcanon names based on popular names for girls in England in the 1950s.  
> \- Not sure if the Grady sisters will make much of an appearance after this.  
> \- My descriptions of The Overlook are very loosely based on varying depictions I've seen other authors make about the concept of Sheol.  
> \- If Carrie must be dead, then I'm making her a poltergeist, or at least letting her have that label. I feel like it fits, given her TK.  
> \- You cannot pry the headcanon that Jack Torrance Shines from my cold, dead hands, so don't bother trying.  
> \- Personally I hc that Jack's form of Shining is that he's an empath, and since he had no true understanding of his powers or someone to teach him, plus developing his alcoholism, his Shine became warped. He feels more intensely and strongly than even he realizes, and the lack of awareness of his powers coupled with how the alcoholism impairs judgement and brain function left him wide open to being taken advantage of by The Overlook. This is why, post-mortem, his Shine manifests as a type of dark light that pulls in more than it puts out unless he's in contact with someone else who also Shines.


End file.
